e2.0 Smackdown in Bean Town– Git’ch-Yer Tickets Here!

Just when you thought you’d seen everything, the WSJ puts Gates and Jobs together on stage to one-up each other. Of course, now they have a common enemy, Google, so why not? But I don’t want talk about Gates and Jobs, that’s so 1.0… I’m here to announce some infotainment of our own that BSG and our new friends BSG Concours are planning for Boston this June. Fans (and foes, I suppose) of Enterprise 2.0 should all be aware of a lively gentleman’s debate that has kicked up in the blogosphere between Tom Davenport and Andrew McAfee on the relevance of Enterprise 2.0 and its likelihood of adoption in large enterprises. It really all started back in September ‘06 when Optimize magazine published a discussion with McAfee and JP Rangaswami, two known e2.0 evangelists, and then asked Davenport to respond which he did with this column. McAfee published a response to Davenport’s criticism on his Harvard blog and several bloggers who track enterprise 2.0 took notice, myself and Vinnie Mirchandani included.

This March, Davenport again chose to target McAfee with a provocative post, “Why Enterprise 2.0 Won’t Transform Organizations” in his regular Harvard Business Online blog. Davenport essentially pooh-poohs Enterprise 2.0, calling it the next “small thing:”

Such a utopian vision can hardly be achieved through new technology alone. The absence of participative technologies in the past is not the only reason that organizations and expertise are hierarchical. Enterprise 2.0 software and the Internet won’t make organizational hierarchy and politics go away. They won’t make the ideas of the front-line worker in corporations as influential as those of the CEO. Most of the barriers that prevent knowledge from flowing freely in organizations – power differentials, lack of trust, missing incentives, unsupportive cultures, and the general busyness of employees today – won’t be addressed or substantially changed by technology alone. For a set of technologies to bring about such changes, they would have to be truly magical, and Enterprise 2.0 tools fall short of magic.

McAfee was quick to respond and published this reply, excerpted here:

My optimism, and my interest in the component technologies of E2.0, comes not (solely) from my inherent geekiness, but from the fact that these technologies really are something new under the sun. They’re not extensions or enhancements to previous generations of corporate tools for collaboration and knowledge management; instead, they’re radical departures from them. Technology platforms that are initially freeform and eventually emergent, that require no nerd skills to use, and that contain the SLATES elements I proposed a while back were born on the Internet just a couple years ago, and are now starting to make their way behind the firewall.

Tom is correct to say that these platforms won’t by themselves turn our existing hierarchical, political, and busy companies into egalitarian gestalts of knowledge creation and continuous bottom-up innovation. What they will do, I believe, is give managers who want more lateralism, egalitarianism, crowdsourcing, idea percolation, self-organization, collective intelligence, etc. a new and unprecedented opportunity to obtain them.

There’s much more to his argument; I encourage you to read his entire post rebuttal. Since March, several bloggers have joined in on this discussion. There are excellent posts by Joe McKendrick, Tom Mandel, Bill Ives, Jon Husband, and Louis Suarez.

Because BSG Concours has an existing business relationship Davenport and McAfee is a fellow Enterprise Irregular, while we were having dinner in Naples last week, I asked my new Concours colleagues what they thought of getting these two gurus together “f2f” for a videopodcast one-on-one. Everyone agreed it would be a terrific idea.

I’m happy to report both gurus agreed to face off and have committed to the event. We’re going to choose a neutral moderator from the media community. Right now, it’s just a matter of scheduling. As luck would have it, the Enterprise 2.0 Conference is being held June 18-21 in Boston (both Davenport and McAfee are in Boston), so we’re shooting for that week, as most of the “community” will be in f2f range. But if we have to do it after the conference, we will. We will keep you posted. In the mean time, if you have questions you’d like to ask these two– post your comments to the blog. Or email them here to info a t bsgalliance d o t com.